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William Jackson Harper, Amir Arison
and Demosthenes Chrysan
in Queens Boulevard (the musical)
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Like No Other Place on Earth
Signature Playwright-in-Residence Charles Mee has traveled the world, mining material for his plays in the cafés of Paris and the ruins of Greece. For his current play at Signature he visited a corner of the world closer to home but no less compelling: Queens, New York.
"The condition of Queens is the condition of the world," Mee told Signature Edition in an interview before rehearsals began for the world premiere of Queens Boulevard (the musical), the second offering of Signature Theatre Company's Charles Mee Series. "People from lots of different places, different countries, cultures, memories, values, ways of seeing things, understandings - figuring out how to get from day to day with each other. There's no other place like it on earth, except for the whole earth itself."
In 2000, the U.S. Census Bureau calculated that 46% of the residents of Queens County, New York, were foreign born. By 2006, according to the Census Bureau's American Community Survey, that number had increased to 48%. Approximately one hundred and fifty different languages are spoken in Queens and 56% of all Queens' residents speak a language other than English at home. Of that number, 57% speak a language other than Spanish.
"I think part of the reason Chuck is attracted to [Queens] as a theatrical setting is that it makes concrete the abstract idea of the global village," says Queens Boulevard (the musical) director Davis McCallum. "There are certain zip codes in Queens, they say, that are the most diverse single points on the globe. So it's the perfect place for investigating community on a global scale."
Debargo Sanyal and Amir Arison
in Queens Boulevard (the musical)
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The global community is a driving theme in Mee's quartet of plays, The New New World, which includes Coney Island Avenue, The Mail Order Bride, Queens Boulevard (the musical), and Utopia Parkway. All four plays can be found on Mee's website, "The (Re)making Project," at www.charlesmee.org. The plays take their inspirations from different world dramatic traditions and folk tales, such as ancient Greece, Chinese Yuan drama, and India's Tales of Birbal, but are set in present-day Queens and Brooklyn. Mee began the series after seeing Morning Song, a piece by Flemish theatre director Jan Lauwers and his troupe Needcompany, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. "The piece was about all sorts of things, but one thing that struck me very strongly was that his company of actors is composed of actors from Belgium, Germany, Italy and North Africa, and his wife who is Indonesian," Mee recalls. "And I looked at this company performing-some of them speaking French, some Italian, some English-and I thought: Oh, this group of actors embodies the condition of the European Union today. No, they embody the condition of the world. And I wanted to do the same thing in an American setting that they did in Europe."
Mee began Queens Boulevard (the musical) after attending his daughter Erin's wedding in Cochin, a city in Kerala, India. Kerala is the birth place of kathakali, a form of ritualistic dance-drama created in the seventeenth century. Kathakali, which literally translates into "story play," dramatizes stories from the Indian epics the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. At Ms. Mee's wedding, a kathakali theatre company performed for the guests. "Even if I'd never thought of Indian theatre before, that focused my attention," Mee recalls. "And kathakali is a form of dance theatre that embraces music and movement-like the Greeks, like [German modern dance choreographer] Pina Bausch, like the sort of theatre I love most. And so I found my way to a kathakali play called The Flower of Good Fortune, or The Flower of Heaven-about a young groom who goes out to look for that special flower for his new wife, and has a series of wild adventures in the jungle, among the wild animals and the demons there. I've taken a number of classical Greek tragedies and set them in America today. So I thought it would be fun to bring a classical kathakali play to America. Where? Where do lots of Indians come when they come to America? To Queens. And so my young groom leaves the house and sets out into the jungle of Queens to look for a Flower of Heaven for his bride."
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Amir Arison and Michi Barall
in Queens Boulevard (the musical)
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In Queens Boulevard (the musical), Amir Arison makes his Signature debut as the groom, Vijay, and Michi Barall returns to Signature as the bride, Shizuko. Also making Signature debuts are Satya Bhabha, Marsha Stephanie Blake, Bill Buell, Demosthenes Chrysan, Geeta Citygirl, Emily Donahoe, William Jackson Harper, Jodi Lin, Arian Moayad, Debargo Sanyal, Jon Norman Schneider, and Ruth Zhang, who portray the forty-plus friends, family, ex-lovers, and sundry characters that encompass the borough's panoply of ethnicities and histories. Signature also welcomes the return of choreographer Peter Pucci, and music supervisor and arranger Michael Friedman. New to Signature are music director Matt Castle, and designers Mimi Lien (set), Christal Weatherly (costumes), Marcus Doshi (lights), Ken Travis (sound), and Joseph Spirito (video).
As is his custom, Mee has lifted many of the voices of these characters from the world around him. Although some are based on actual people he has encountered in Queens and Kerala, others grew out of a series of internet blogs organized by Queens subway stops www.nycbloggers.com/queens. Selections from and allusions to Homer's The Odyssey, the love poems of Japanese Heian Dynasty poet Ono no Komachi, and James Joyce's novel Ulysses tumble from their mouths as well, illustrating the community's rich and diverse cultural history. "Queens has a tremendous number of recent immigrants-but it also has several neighborhoods that have been more long-standing enclaves of Irish and Greeks," explains Mee. "So, if you imagine that the residents of Queens are going around the streets occasionally thinking of the great classics of their childhoods or of their ancestors' childhoods, some are thinking of the Yuan plays of China, some are thinking of kathakali dance drama, some are thinking of James Joyce, and others are thinking of Homer."
Mee and McCallum have made numerous trips into Queens, from driving the length of Queens Boulevard itself to holding design meetings in various diners. Two neighborhoods which particularly inspired them were Jackson Heights, the main hub of Queens' Indian and Latino communities, and Flushing, home of many Chinese and Korean residents. "I love Jackson Heights," Mee enthuses. "Seventy-fourth street, the Jackson Diner, and the music stores just down the block from it. And the Butala Emporium, the store directly across the street from the Jackson Diner, where there is a treasure trove of comic books telling the stories of the Mahabharata. And I love Main Street in Flushing-and East, the Chinese restaurant there where my wife [Michi Barall] and I were married in the banquet room by our old friend, the director Anne Bogart."
McCallum recalls an outing with Queens Boulevard set designer Mimi Lien to East Manor Restaurant & Caterers in Flushing, which holds ballroom dancing classes on the first Monday of the month. "It was just so wonderful, so unexpected, and it was such a bringing together of people from different parts of the world in the joy of ballroom dancing," he says. "There was a disco ball that was turning, the lights were flashing, there were these synthesized versions of Strauss waltzes, everyone was eating dim sum, and I thought: This also feels like the world of the play."
The cast of Queens Boulevard (the musical)
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The set design will play a key role in capturing the contrasts inherent in both Queens life and Mee's writing. "I think of Chuck's plays not just in terms of design, but in terms of style," says McCallum. "Often he'll ask for you to have your cake and eat it too. He'll say the play needs to be set in this, but it can also be more like this, and in order to really serve the play you need to get both. What is so delightful about Queens is that it's everything and everything else. And so we didn't want a space that was clean and simple and minimal. We wanted a space that was a burgeoning excess of lots of cultures interacting and feeding each other and clashing and creating other cultures. Like an installation where lots of disparate objects are brought together." With that in mind, Lien has created a design in which several interior and exterior worlds occupy one space. These worlds reference Roosevelt Avenue in Jackson Heights with its elevated subway; a club or banqueting room with a dance floor; as well as fragments of an Irish pub, Russian bath house, and a produce stand.
Despite the creative team's deep immersion into Queens, what they will ultimately present on stage will stay truer to the spirit of the borough, rather than be a realistic depiction. According to McCallum, "The Queens of the play isn't the real Queens. It's the idea of Queens. There's a magical element to it which comes in part from the fact that the play in structure is derived from The Odyssey. So it has a kind of Homeric, slightly hallucinatory, dream-like logic to it. I don't think the visual style of the play leads audiences to expect logical and literal consistency. Rather, it invites them to go on a kind of mythic journey, from a wedding reception, to the Underworld, and back to the world of the living."
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